Winnowing the Field in the GOP: Rick Perry and Scott Walker Gone

Rick Perry, the longest-serving governor of Texas ever, should never have run for president in 2015. He blew it last time he ran when he couldn’t remember the name of the third governmental department he would eliminate if he were president. Even when Ron Paul tried to help him by naming a third department that Perry might want to eliminate, Perry brushed off Paul’s helping hand.

“No, that’s not it,” Perry said.

The Donald is right. Perry isn’t any smarter even with black horn-rimmed glasses. We all remember his signature gaffe. If black horn-rimmed glasses made people smarter, toddlers in high-brow Manhattan preschools would wear them, and so would their parents.

Scott Walker, Wisconsin’s governor, could have been royalty. His eyes are too close together and he had access to an obscene amount of money. With the Koch brothers’ and ALEC’s support, he could have gone far. Unfortunately for him, he plunged in the polls from an early lead in Iowa to an asterisk, the lowest asterisk in the GOP field (less than half of one percent according to a national CNN/ORC poll). So his potential funders gave him a pass. The Koch brothers are looking for a winner.

Beating down the teachers’ union in Wisconsin and bragging about it didn’t give Walker the credibility he was hoping for. He was weak in the debates.

Those rising in the GOP field now are those who performed best in the debates, which is to say, those who were the best informed on things like foreign policy. Carly Fiorina, insulted on the basis of her face (“look at that face!”) by Donald Trump, is now #1 in the polls. Trump is #2 for the first time in the campaign season. Marco Rubio has risen and Ben Carson, who just said that a Muslim should never be president, has fallen.

That surprises me, frankly. Who knew that Mr. Nice Guy, Ben Carson, could lose points for bashing Muslims among the GOP? Maybe Republicans realized there was a dark side to Mr. Nice.